Meet the winning startups at AVCC and HackDay

Twenty-nine startup companies presented at the Americas Venture Capital Conference, competing for investors’ time and money. These companies were also awarded prizes after being chosen by a panel of judges:

Trapezoid provides hardware-based security solutions for enterprise and cloud environments. Robert Rounsavali, founder and CEO, said most of Trapezoid's 10-person team came from Terremark, and he began forming the company after Terremark was sold. Another Miami company, Digital Era Group, provided the company's seed round, he said. "We're ready to go to market. We're ready to take down another funding round to accelerate our growth," Rounsavali said, explaining that the team has already been in talks with Intel Capital.

itMD provides easy and convenient access to medical images with the itMD network. The platform digitally connects doctors, patients and imaging facilities to help save money and time, said Barbara Perez Deppman (pictured at left), president of the cloud-based medical software company. itMD, founded in 2010, now is a company of 10. Winning at AVCC "really means a lot to us and the patients we serve now and will in the future as we advance our mission to the general public," said Deppman, who added that the company is seeking to raise $5 million in funding.

• CP Capital Early Stage Company ($10,000 in services): Cognicor of Spain.

Cognicor, part of Wayra's accelerator in Barcelona, is an innovative customer service management system. "We're complaint resolution as a service," said Sindhu Joseph (pictured at right), who founded the company with her husband and also presented at Wayra's DemoDay. Cognicor now has eight people and has already solved 90,000 complaints for clients, including Telefonica. The team has raised $150K is looking to raise $1 million for scale-up.

• New Frontier Nomads Idea Validation and Micro-MVP Prize ($10,000 in services to validate, design and develop a mobile MVP): fotopigeon of Tampa (pictured at right in the "Hot Zone.")

Frederick Hutson, Alfonzo Brooks and Damien Drakes, are the three co-founders of fotopigeon, a photo sharing and printing services company aimed at two niches: the military and the incarcerated. They said they have been so focused on building their company in Tampa, they haven't had a chance to experience much of the startup scene and this was their first big presentation. Will they move to Miami? They will be considering it, the team said. "We chose fotopigeon because we liked the way they resegmented the market and identified an underserved niche," said Andrej Kostresevic, founder of New Frontier Nomads.

Five teams, all finalists from HackDay, competed for a $30,000 cash prize plus an additional $20,000 cash, free co-working space at The LAB Miami and mentoring if the team starts the company (cash prize provided by Knight Foundation and Tres Mares). The winner will also get a chance to be fast-tracked into a final round of a Wayra accelerator program's application process.

And the winner is: AskMeOut from Brazil.

AskMeOut, a dating service that algorithmically finds the best matches within your social network and pairs couples that want to mutually connect, is the creation of a team of three Brazilian teen-agers, pictured at left. Gustavo Braga, Anderson Ferminiano and Henrique Dubugras have already started two other companies, and even presented one of them, eduqueme, at AVCC, making them the youngest presenters yet at the 3-year-old conference. What did they say when asked at the awards ceremony if they would come to Miami this summer to further develop AskMeOut? One of us is 17 so he has to check with his parents, one of them quipped. But later on, to The Next Web, they said they would be coming to Miami.

Runner-up: Introduced.co of Miami, presented by University of Miami student and serial entrepreneur Tyler McIntyre, won a year of free co-working space at The LAB Miami and a free ticket to an upcoming 500 Startups event. Introducted.co is a real-time LinkedIn for conferences.